Many patients suffering from gynecological diseases such as fibroids and/or adenomyosis require intervention in order to improve the diseases' symptoms. Usually, treatment choice is guided by the patient's age and desire to preserve fertility and/or her uterus.
Over the last few years a variety of non invasive treatments has become available to women with symptomatic fibroids and provides alternatives to the surgery. For example, Uterine artery embolization (UAE) which was first described in 1995 (Ravina J H, Bouret J M, Fried D et al. Value of preoperative embolization of uterine fibroma: report of a multicenter series of 31 cases. Contracept Fertil Sex 1995; 23: 45-49, and since then this method has become widely used to treat or treating gynecological diseases such as for example fibroids, or more recently adenomyosis, as a less invasive alternative to hysterectomy.
Besides UAE and transvaginal uterine artery occlusion, thermal related treatment methods have provided additional minimally invasive options such as percutaneous laser treatment, cryoablation, thermal myolysis with laser and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided focused ultrasound.
Overall, clinical studies of UAE patients with fibroids have reported an improvement in menstrual bleeding scores but a significant proportion of patients bleeding is not normalized following the procedure.
On the other hand, the use of anti-progestational agents before a surgical treatment has also been proposed to shrink uterine leiomoymata (WO2007/103510) or to render the patient amenorrheic.
Thus, there remain significant unmet needs for efficient and better long-term therapies for normalizing menstrual bleeding in a patient suffering from a benign gynecological disease and undergoing a vascular occlusion method or thermal related treatment method.